Dr. Richard E. Nisbett is the author of "Intelligence and How to Get It" and "Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking."

For 2500 years, educators were confident that education not merely taught people useful facts and procedures for solving particular problems, but made people smarter in general. 20th century psychologists were dubious that there was much “transfer” of abilities taught in the classroom to the infinite variety of problems encountered in everyday life. The debate now centers on what is called “critical thinking skills.” Current evidence that higher education produces much in the way of critical thinking skills is mixed at best. But is college getting a bum rap? Is there a more optimistic story to be told – one more in the line with what thinkers from Plato to Dewey believed? And what would we have to do to be certain that college students were really smarter on the way out than they were on the way in?

This lecture is part of the Department of Psychology's Exploring the Mind Lecture Series.